March already?

Why does February only have 28 days? It has no business being that short – always feels the lack of those two extra days when I’m busy. Anyway – a little bit of the current status.

I’ve been trying to release new screenshots/graphics regularly each week, but this weekend just got too busy. I’ll try to resume with that this week or the next. Apart from that, the first few months this year have gone into heavy development.

Much of January was spent working on the code in Dwarf King. Most of the framework for the game is now in place, although there remain some parts that are still not fully developed. I’ll have to go back through some of the code there; but I don’t want to build a lot of functionality in there that I might then decide to throw away. At the moment, I’m pretty much waiting for some of the content for the game to be produced (i.e., maps, storylines, etc), while I work on other aspects.

An important milestone for Pirates and Traders 2 was reached, when I received the new in-game map. That required some re-work of the game engine as I ran into some unexpected performance issues, but most of those should be solved now. I love the new map (which I posted on FB), and work is now progressing on filling in the map data. Unlike the original game, the P&T2 map will be a grid map, so every space on the map needs to have data encoded (name, description – if it’s an interesting place, special features, etc). It’s a lot of work – unfortunately – but I think the result will be worth it.

Finally, I’ve been working on a major “rebuild” of the Small Battles combat engine. Combat is an important component of Dwarf King, and it is of course not irrelevant in Pirates and Traders 2 either. I experimented with a couple of different combat models, but I’ve now eventually – I hope – settled on the version I’m going to use. Assuming things work the way I want them to, it’ll be a simple turn-based combat system, played out on a hex grid. I’ve been putting the finishing touches to the new version in the past weeks, and assuming I soon get rid of the last bugs, I might do some alpha testing of that soon and integrating with the Pirates and Traders as well as Dwarf King engines.